At the movies, great expectations can be a burden

I walked into The Words last month expecting an adequate middlebrow drama starring Bradley Cooper as an ethically challenged writer. Lo and behold, that’s what I saw. It’s also what I wrote, and I was surprised when many others, who expected more, were gravely disappointed.

I walked into The Dark Knight Rises this summer expecting the Second Coming. I saw a finely crafted but oddly distant epic that beat me into liking it.

It was once possible to sit down in a dark theater carrying no preconceived notions, which is still the ideal frame of mind for watching a movie. Those days are all but gone, even for those who don’t happen to write about film for a living.

Sure, you had a basic idea of what you were getting into with a John Wayne picture, or the genre-codified movies that thrived in the studio system. But even these came with fascinating subversions and revisions. That’s what made them worth watching.

Today the 24/7 buzz factory removes most of the suspense and leaves little space for serendipity. It’s not just the many versions of trailers that are posted online; reviews of trailers are posted online. Experts issue awards predictions before many of the big nominees are even seen by the predictors, let alone the public. Perhaps Dionne Warwick could have skipped the whole Psychic Friends thing and become a showbiz pundit.

The expectation trap is particularly perilous for critics. (Yeah, I know, cry me a river.) When you cover a beat, part of your job is to listen to the drumbeats. You eavesdrop on the conversation and report back the fragments. Then come the big festivals: Did you hear they booed the new Terrence Malick film, To the Wonder, at Venice? What about that deafening buzz for Argo out of Toronto?

An ill-informed journalist helps nobody. Neither do critics who have already made their judgments before they see a movie. Therein lies the rub: How do you keep your antennae up and your mind open? How do you avoid groupthink?

One option: Don’t read other critics before you form your own thoughts. Seems simple enough. The thing is, we’re all movie fans. We want to be part of the conversation, and the conversation, by definition, means swapping ideas and opinions, shaking our heads or nodding in agreement as we read the paper or check the Twitter feed. And someone always starts the conversation.

So you do your best to turn the volume down on the hype without muting it. Argo, the fantastic new Ben Affleck comedy-thriller, provides an instructive case in point. I didn’t see it at the Toronto International Film Festival when I was there in September; I knew I’d get the chance a couple of weeks later. But you can’t (and shouldn’t) walk around a festival for a week without hearing what others are saying. And everyone was saying Argo was gold.

You’re not going to forget that without undergoing an Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind memory wipe. You’re going to enter Argo with a Missouri attitude: Show me.

The trick, advisable to all moviegoers, is really not a trick at all. Think for yourself. Listen to the other voices. Take them in. File them away. But never treat them as gospel.

I find myself saying this constantly: My opinion is not yours, and you may hate a movie I loved. (Judging from my emails, The Master fits this bill.) But if I can ask some questions, get you thinking, maybe even get you to wonder what in the world I was thinking, I’ve done my job.

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About Chris Vognar

Chris has written about film, music, theater and books for The News since 1996. He attended Harvard for a year as the 2009 Arts and Culture Fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of UC Berkeley, where he received his B.A. in English literature. He is has taught arts journalism at SMU and film history at the University of Texas at Arlington. Chris has covered the Toronto Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival, and the Academy Awards. Follow Chris on Twitter @chrisvognar.

Education/career track: Studied literature and film at Berkeley. Sold futons for six years. Arrived at the Dallas Morning News in 1996.

I'd rather be: In school. I went to Harvard for a Nieman Fellowship from 2008-2009, and I teach arts journalism at SMU.

When I'm not watching movies I'm watching: The NBA. Go Mavs.

Why I write about movies: Because I love them. Well, the good ones anyway.

Favorite movie: Depends on the day you ask. But you can never go wrong with Chinatown.

Hometown: Berkeley, CA

Education: Chris received his B.A. in English literature from UC Berkeley.